A Map of Reykjavik showing where different nationalities live. Each dot symbolizes 25 people. CC-BY-SA 3.0 PaBaMapa.com.

Here is a rather large map showing the nationalities of the inhabitants of Reykjavik. Each dot represents around 25 people. You can click on it for higher defintion.

The Icelanders are shown in gray, since they would otherwise dominate the map. The locations within each district are representative only, so do not expect to meet 25 Lithuanians at an exact location of a green dot.

There are some interesting patterns to be see here. The most diverse districts are the City centre, Vesturbær, Austurbær and Breiðholt. Breiðholt is particularly popular among Poles and Lithuanians whereas those from Westernern Europe and the USA prefer the city centre.

This one is inspired on New York Times’ visualization of the US-census, called Mapping America, Every City, Every Block.

I got the data for the most populous nationalities in every district of Reykjavik from the Statistical Office of Iceland. You can see the file I ended up using here: distvsnat.xlsx.

You can find the detailed projection here:esc2012projectionfinal.

The projection for the second semifinal follows here, these are the ten projected finalists in decreasing probability order:

1. Turkey
2. Serbia
3. Sweden
4. Estonia
5. Norway
6. Croatia
7. Bosnia
8. Slovenia
9. Georgia
10. Macedonia

In fact Lithuania and Macedonia were tied to the point in the 10th place in the projection, We had to apply tie braking procedures to put Macedonia ahead.

This projection relies heavily on Youtube watch-counts, making this semi-final a bit problematic since turkey has 4 times more hits than the next country.

For fun: here are the youtube-hits for each country (in thousands) as they were on monday evening.

1. Cyprus
2. Russia
3. Albania
4. Greece
5. Romania
6. Ireland
7. Iceland
8. Moldova
9. San Marino
10. Denmark

The projections for the second semifinal as well as the final will be provided on the days of those events. But long story short: Russia is looking strong.

The justices on the Court of Impeachment were unanimous in their decisions to acquit the former PM for three of the charges. The vote on the fourth went 9-6. Here’s a brief breakdown of the votes on that one.

Votes in the Court of Impeachment on whether fmr. PM Geir H. Haarde was guilty of "not holding ministerial meetings on important State matters".

Here’s the breakdown in some more detail.

The Court of Impeachment consists of 8 judges chosen by the Parliament, 5 longest-serving Supreme Court judges, 1 Proffessor of Constitutional Law from the University of Iceland and The Chief Judge of Reykjavik District Court.

Parliament Appointed Judges

The Parliament chose the judges for the Court of Impeachment in 2005. The judges were chosen using proportional list representation. There were two lists: List A was the list of judges nominated by right-wing government at the time, List B were the judges nominated by (then) left-wing opposition. Here is those list of judges, that ended up sitting in the court, along with their list affiliation and verdict.

Thus, the pattern here seems pretty clear. Those nominated by the left (or current government) voted to convict, those nominated by the the current opposition voted “not guilty.

The full list of judges nominated by the Parliament as well as the stand-ins can be found under the following link: http://www.althingi.is/altext/131/f134.sgml

Supreme Court Judges

Supreme Court judges are nominated by the Minister of the Interior (formerly Minister of Justice). Here’s the list of the 5 Supreme Court justices, the political background of the minister nominating them and their verdict:

The Justice Ministers in the years 1991-2009 were all members of the right-wing Indpendence party. A left-wing government took power in 2009. Note that this necessarily indicates the political background of the justices themselves, just the ministers (or governments) nomitating them. It should also be mentioned that there, where more senior judges on the Supreme Court, who apparently did not take their seats in the Court of Impeachment, probably due to their connection to the defendant.

Other Judges

Finally there are two more judges, one from the university of Iceland, and the Chief Judge Reykjavik District Court. (Both where in fact Stand-ins as the the professor of Constitutional Law, Björg Thorarensen opted out, and the Chief Judge of Reykjavik District Court was on a leave.)

Benedikt Bogarson has been a District Court Judge, (nominated by a right-wing minister) and was recently appointed to the Supreme Court by a left-wing minister. Eggert Óskarsson was nominated to the Reykjavik District Court by right wing minister but had been serving as a Reykjavik City Judge for some time before that. (Similar comments apply to some of the Supreme Court Judges in the paragraph before, there “political connection” is not always 100% clear. Or at least not to me.)

You can find the full verdict (in Icelandic) here:
http://www.xn--landsdmur-b7a.is/domar-og-urskurdir/nr/77

Voting Blocks in the UN General Assembly 2000-2008. CC-BY-SA 3.0 PaBaMapa.com.

The UN’s General Assembly is body where each  UN nation gets one vote. Looking at these votes through the years 2000-2008, we check how often given to countries agree/disagree on a particular issue. The above picture is a so call “spring graph”, where country that vote similarily are shown close to one another, and those who disagree a lot are show far apart.

The colors represent the five regional groups of the UN. You can clearly see some things: The division between the developed/western world and the rest, as well as the relative isolation of USA and Israel in voting in the General Assembly.

Here is an applet where you can draw the countries in question around. If you click on one country and move the mouse over another one you can see their correlation.

Sources

The data of all UN GA votes -2008 can be found here:

Erik Voeten and Adis Merdzanovic, “United Nations General Assembly Voting Data”, hdl:1902.1/12379 UNF:3:Hpf6qOkDdzzvXF9m66yLTg== V1 [Version]

The physics part of the applet was taken and modified from the following example: http://www.openprocessing.org/visuals/?visualID=10349 by Joris Dormans.

1 Denmark 99.0%
2 Norway 98.9%
3 Netherlands 98.7%
4 Luxembourg 98.6%
5 Belgium 98.4%
6 Poland 98.4%
7 Czech Republic 98.2%
8 Lithuania 98.2%
9 Slovakia 98.2%
10 Slovenia 98.2%
11 Finland 98.1%
12 German Federal Republic 98.1%
13 Greece 98.1%
14 Bulgaria 98.1%
15 Hungary 98.1%
16 Italy 97.8%
17 Romania 97.6%
18 Spain 97.6%
19 Portugal 97.5%
20 Estonia 97.4%
21 Liechtenstein 97.4%
22 Croatia 97.3%
23 Austria 97.1%
24 Latvia 96.9%
25 Macedonia 96.9%
26 Montenegro 96.9%
27 Andorra 96.8%
28 Sweden 96.3%
29 San Marino 96.0%
30 Ireland 95.7%
31 Monaco 95.1%
32 Yugoslavia 94.5%
33 Cyprus 94.5%
34 Moldova 94.4%
35 Malta 93.9%
36 Georgia 93.3%
37 Switzerland 93.2%
38 New Zealand 92.7%
39 Japan 92.7%
40 Canada 91.6%
41 South Korea 91.5%
42 France 91.5%
43 Bosnia and Herzegovina 91.1%
44 Ukraine 90.8%
45 Albania 90.3%
46 United Kingdom 90.3%
47 Turkey 90.0%
48 Australia 86.7%
49 Argentina 82.1%
50 Armenia 81.5%
51 Chile 78.7%
52 Samoa 78.7%
53 Peru 78.2%
54 Uruguay 77.8%
55 Kazakhstan 77.7%
56 Guatemala 77.4%
57 Paraguay 76.9%
58 Russia 76.9%
59 Brazil 76.7%
60 Panama 75.8%
61 Mexico 75.3%
62 Costa Rica 74.9%
63 Honduras 74.3%
64 Dominican Republic 74.2%
65 Thailand 74.1%
66 Mongolia 74.1%
67 Solomon Islands 74.0%
68 Azerbaijan 73.9%
69 Bolivia 73.8%
70 Singapore 73.8%
71 El Salvador 73.8%
72 Ecuador 73.6%
73 Bahamas 73.5%
74 Fiji 73.5%
75 South Africa 73.3%
76 Nicaragua 73.2%
77 Philippines 72.7%
78 Colombia 72.6%
79 East Timor 72.5%
80 Belarus 72.5%
81 Belize 72.5%
82 Ghana 72.4%
83 Jamaica 72.0%
84 Barbados 71.9%
85 Tanzania 71.9%
86 Zambia 71.9%
87 Guyana 71.7%
88 Kyrgyzstan 71.7%
89 Eritrea 71.7%
90 Maldives 71.7%
91 Sri Lanka 71.7%
92 Mauritius 71.6%
93 Papua New Guinea 71.6%
94 Burkina Faso 71.3%
95 Cape Verde 71.3%
96 Namibia 71.3%
97 Burundi 71.2%
98 Cambodia 71.2%
99 Haiti 71.2%
100 Nepal 71.2%
101 Nigeria 71.1%
102 Senegal 71.0%
103 Botswana 70.9%
104 Mali 70.8%
105 Mozambique 70.8%
106 Trinidad and Tobago 70.8%
107 Tonga 70.8%
108 Antigua & Barbuda 70.7%
109 Ethiopia 70.5%
110 Tajikistan 70.5%
111 Togo 70.5%
112 Brunei 70.4%
113 Guinea 70.2%
114 Kenya 70.2%
115 Tunisia 70.2%
116 Madagascar 70.2%
117 St. Vincent and the Grenadines 70.2%
118 Jordan 70.1%
119 Venezuela 70.1%
120 Afghanistan 69.9%
121 Bangladesh 69.9%
122 St. Lucia 69.9%
123 United Arab Emirates 69.9%
124 Djibouti 69.9%
125 Lesotho 69.7%
126 Algeria 69.6%
127 Angola 69.6%
128 Malaysia 69.6%
129 Yemen 69.6%
130 Benin 69.6%
131 Gabon 69.6%
132 Indonesia 69.6%
133 Kuwait 69.6%
134 Morocco 69.4%
135 Bahrain 69.3%
136 Congo 69.2%
137 Qatar 69.1%
138 Mauritania 69.0%
139 China 69.0%
140 Lebanon 69.0%
141 Oman 69.0%
142 Zimbabwe 68.7%
143 Ivory Coast 68.6%
144 Grenada 68.5%
145 Saudi Arabia 68.4%
146 Suriname 68.4%
147 Swaziland 68.1%
148 Sudan 68.0%
149 Niger 67.9%
150 Uzbekistan 67.9%
151 Laos 67.8%
152 Malawi 67.5%
153 Myanmar 67.3%
154 Pakistan 67.3%
155 Vanuatu 67.2%
156 Guinea-Bissau 67.1%
157 Comoros 67.0%
158 Egypt 67.0%
159 Federated States of Micronesia 67.0%
160 Libya 67.0%
161 Seychelles 66.9%
162 Cuba 66.8%
163 Vietnam 66.6%
164 Uganda 66.4%
165 Central African Republic 66.4%
166 Bhutan 66.2%
167 Turkmenistan 66.1%
168 Dominica 66.0%
169 Iran 66.0%
170 Syria 66.0%
171 Iraq 65.9%
172 Sierra Leone 65.8%
173 Tuvalu 65.7%
174 Sao Tome and Principe 65.5%
175 Equatorial Guinea 65.3%
176 Cameroon 65.2%
177 India 65.1%
178 Liberia 64.9%
179 Nauru 64.7%
180 Chad 63.1%
181 Marshall Islands 62.9%
182 Palau 62.8%
183 Rwanda 62.7%
184 Somalia 62.4%
185 North Korea 62.2%
186 Gambia 62.1%
187 Democratic Republic of the Congo 61.8%
188 St. Kitts and Nevis 61.4%
189 Kiribati 60.9%
190 Israel 55.2%
191 United States of America 46.3%

This is taken from the following source: [Erik Voeten and Adis Merdzanovic, "United Nations General Assembly Voting Data", http://hdl.handle.net/1902.1/12379 UNF:3:Hpf6qOkDdzzvXF9m66yLTg== V1 [Version] ]

If you are interested in the full pivot table showing the correlation between all UN member states, check back in a couple of days.

Related: Voting Patterns in UN General Assembly

If we only look at the localities on the main island, the answer is: Borgarfjörður eystri.

The route to Borgarfjörður eystri from Reykjavík, through Akureyri and Egilsstaðir. From yournavigation.org. Map data CC-BY-SA by OpenStreetMap.

According to the route planner that comes with Google Maps, it takes 8 hours and 58 minuites to drive from Reykjavík to Borgarfjörður eystri.

If you want a full list of all travel distances from Reykjavík it can be found in the following Excel file: distancesIceland.

Background photo. User: APM Alex. CC-BY-SA 3.0. ( http://www.flickr.com/photos/28misguidedsouls/5595270199/sizes/m/in/photostream/)

For those of you who follow my Icelandic writings í Fréttablaðið, I wrote an article about organ donations last Friday. When it comes down to officially registering your wish with regards to organ donations, the only formal way seems to be writing formal “living will” and sending it to the Directorate of Health.

I was interested to see how many had indeed taken such steps. According to the staff of the Directorate this number is currently 460 people, in the entire country.